Saturday, July 17, 2010

The sun has been out, I changed jobs plus I'm getting married in a couple of months. These factors have conspired against me getting as much done lately.

Having said that, I've finished decompiling and understanding the routines that handle both the logic of in-game objects and their rendering behaviour. In plain English, the scenery that makes up the levels. There are 15 routines in total with a lot of code duplication between them. The level object structure contains a field that denotes which routine should be used.

One example is the checkpoint sign at the end of a stage. Each sign consists of two objects; the pillar of the sign and the header which reads "CHECK". Each part of the sign is drawn by a separate routine. The top of the checkpoint sign is drawn by a routine that also determines when the user has past the sign (to handle further game logic like loading the next stage). Whereas the base is handled by a similar routine that doesn't make this check. Additionally, there are two checkpoint signs at the end of each level and only one of them handles the check. Therefore, it cannot be assumed that because an object looks the same, it will always be handled by the same routine.

There is further complexity in these routines. Let's take the water strip sprites, seen on the left hand side of Coconut Beach (Stage 1) as an example. Each strip is processed by a custom routine that examines its screen z value. If the z value is particularly close to the screen, the sprite is simply zoomed. However, at distances stretching into the horizon the frame is completely changed as well as zooming being applied. There are alternate versions of this routine that swap frames based on the y value of the sprite. This variant is only used on one of the Stage 5 levels.

The palette changing logic for the countdown lights at the start of the game is also embedded as part of this logic. Some routines handle collision checking where necessary too. It's worth noting that I had to play all 15 levels just to understand where the routines were used. Simply looking at the code to figure out what was going on was impossible at times.

Moving on, I'm going to work sequentially through the rest of the decompiled program code. I'm at a stage now where a significant amount of work is complete so there are just gaps to fill in.